"My dear boy, I know what a kind heart you have, I know, too, how much you love me, and the only thing that consoles me for our poverty is the knowledge that you do not repine at your lot." "Repine at my lot when you share it? Besides, what we lack is really only the superfluous. We do not eat capons stuffed with truffles, it is true, but we eat with a good appetite,--witness the rapid disappearance of this big loaf of bread; our clothes are threadbare, but warm; we earn, both together, from seventeen to eighteen hundred francs a year. Not a colossal amount, by any means, but we owe no man a penny. Ah, my dear father, if Heaven never sends me any worse trouble than this, I shall never complain." "You have no idea how much pleasure it gives me to see you accept your lot in life so cheerfully. But tell me, are you really happy?" "Very happy." "Really and truly?" "Why should I wish to deceive you? Do I ever look glum and sour like a man who is discontented with his lot?" "That is only because you have such an uncommonly good disposition, perhaps." "That depends. If I were obliged to live with that abominable old skinflint Ramon, I should soon become intolerable." "Why are you so hard upon that poor man?" "The recollection of the torture I endured under his roof, I suppose." "Torture?" "What else do you call it, father, to live in a big, cold, dilapidated, cheerless house,--a house so dreary, in fact, that the grave seems a cheerful abode in comparison? And then to see those two thin, solemn-faced, famished-looking servants wandering about in that grim sepulchre! And the meals,--meals at which the master of the house seems to count each morsel that you eat! And his daughter,--for the man has a daughter who will perpetuate the breed, I suppose,--and his daughter, who doles out scanty portions for the domestics, and then carefully locks up the remains of the meagre meal!" "Louis, Louis, how is it that you, who are usually so charitably inclined, should be so strangely hostile to this poor man and his daughter?" "His daughter! Can you call such a thing as that a daughter, a big, raw-boned creature, with feet and hands like a man's, a face like a nutcracker, and a nose,--great Heavens! what a nose,--a nose as long as that, and of a brick-red colour? But justice compels me to say that this incomparable creature has yellow hair and black teeth to make up for her red nose." "The portrait is not flattered, evidently, but all women cannot be pretty, and a kind heart is much better than a pretty face." "True, father, but how strange it is that there should be such remarkable contrasts in some families." "What do you mean?"